La larga marcha

The Long Walk is one of my favorite books and I have been dreaming of a movie adaptation. I felt it was promising for the first 30 minutes, mostly due to wonderfully brutal cinematography. However, as soon as the drama ramped up, actors started to overact and the whole script all of a sudden derailed into Hollywood cliche land. I felt like the movie pretty much cut out all the parts of the book I loved the most and butchered the final scenes into something completely different than the subtle but powerful book ending intended to convey.

If you film a much loved book, say Lord of the Rings for this example, and, at the council of Elrond, Gandalf says "Oh, you want to take the ring to Gondor Boromir? OK then", fans of the book are going to be disappointed. And that's how I feel right now. Unlike LOTR, The Long Walk does not have a great deal of action in the traditional sense, so why remove what important moments there are: an adolescent who's never had sex risking everything for a kiss? The barbaric nature of huge crowds gathered to cheer on boys about to die? Or to gamble what small funds they have on who will survive? Why remove all the things that made a novel so special and decide your scriptwriter knows best?

The ending is changed and not convincing and while I can imagine Hollywood require more resolution than the original text, I don't think this was the way to go personally.

Apart from the changes, I thought most of the cast did well but were a bit too well fed and healthy for the supposed economic misery this US faced.

Read the book as a kid, and it never left me.

Stephen King - writing as Richard Bachman - didn't need monsters or explosions to terrify.

He gave us a hundred boys walking down an endless road, dying one by one under the weight of exhaustion, fear, and quiet madness.

It was slow, suffocating, and profoundly human. The horror wasn't in the gunfire - it was in the silence between steps.

And then came the 2025 "movie".

Absolute betrayal. Everything that made the book powerful - the tension, the intimacy, the claustrophobic pacing - is gone.

Filmmakers clearly didn't trust the story's simplicity, so they threw in noise, chaos, and overexposed emotion.

Turned King's psychological death march into yet another dystopian action flick with shaky cameras and empty dialogue.

Characters are cardboard cutouts delivering cliché lines between slow-motion shots.

Watching this movie felt like watching someone pave over a graveyard. Hollywood gloss and lazy direction that doesn't respect the story. It doesn't even seem to understand it.

Shallow and soulless Garbage.

The idea itself works - no surprise, it's Stephen King, he knows how to build a premise. At first the movie even feels like it might pull it off: the suspense starts to grow, you feel the tension creeping in. But then it just... stalls. Instead of escalating, everything flattens, and by the halfway mark you can already predict how it's going to end. And it ends exactly that way. No surprise, no punch.

The characters don't help either. They're too sketchy, like placeholders rather than people. The movie tries to layer in some social commentary, but it's done through such obvious, stereotypical figures that it feels more forced than insightful. On top of that, the drama is laid on way too thick. Every "emotional" moment is broadcasted with neon signs: "Look! Here comes the sad part. Time to cry." It's manipulative rather than moving.

In the end, it's a good story wasted by a weak execution. The tension fizzles, the characters are cardboard, and the emotional beats feel staged. 5/10.

I recently watched this movie, and to be honest, I'm struggling to understand the purpose behind it. From start to finish, it felt like the entire experience was built almost entirely around dialogue, yet those conversations rarely carried any real weight or depth. A film can absolutely thrive on dialogue alone when it's sharp, meaningful, or layered with subtext, but here it felt shallow, repetitive, and ultimately unconvincing.

The characters spend so much time talking, but what they're saying doesn't seem to move the story forward or reveal anything profound about who they are. Instead, it feels like words for the sake of words-long exchanges that might have been aiming for philosophical or emotional depth but fell flat. Without strong dialogue, the movie doesn't have much else to lean on, because there isn't really a compelling plot, standout visuals, or a strong atmosphere to carry the gaps.

Movies built around minimal action and heavy dialogue can be powerful when done well, but this one left me unmoved. It's not that I expect explosions or constant action, but I do expect substance. Unfortunately, this movie just didn't deliver, and I walked away more frustrated than entertained.